The fine print

Terms of Service

Last updated: September 18, 2026

These terms form the agreement between you and Written in Real Stars when you use the service to build a sky, send a gift link, or order a plate. By doing any of those things you accept them. If you do not accept them, please do not use the service.

1. Who you are dealing with

Written in Real Stars is operated as a sole proprietorship by Safowan Mostaque, at 581 Meadowvale Road, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. Email: writteninrealstars@gmail.com. Phone: (647) 491-2051. Either one is the contact point for orders, cancellations, refunds, complaints and anything else in these terms, and both are answered by a person, not a queue. You can also use our contact page.

2. What the service is

The service takes a name and finds a set of real, catalogued stars whose true positions happen to trace that name's letterforms. The catalogue used is AT-HYG, which is compiled from Tycho-2, Gaia DR3 and Hipparcos. It can then present that pattern as a 3D sky you can explore for free, as a shareable link, as a digital file, or as a printed plate.

Two things this is not. It is not a star-naming registry: we do not sell, register, assign or record any right to name a star, and nothing you buy here changes any star's real designation in any catalogue, anywhere. It is also not a scientific instrument: the positions are accurate as published in the source catalogues and are fine for a keepsake, but they are not intended or warranted for professional, navigational or research use.

3. Who may buy

To make a purchase you must be old enough to enter a binding contract where you live. In Ontario that is 18. If you are younger, you may still use the free parts of the service, but a purchase must be made by a parent or guardian.

4. What things cost

All prices are in Canadian dollars (CAD) and are set by us and shown to you before you pay. Nothing about a price is calculated or supplied by your browser; the amount charged is determined on our server.

We are not currently registered to collect sales tax, so none is added: the price shown, plus the shipping charge for a printed plate, is the whole amount you pay. The shipping charge and the itemised total are shown at checkout before you confirm. If a price on the site is ever obviously wrong because of a technical error, we may cancel the affected order and refund it in full rather than honour the mistake; we will tell you if that happens.

5. How an order is made

Before you pay, you are shown what you are buying: the name as it will appear, the size and format you chose, the itemised price including taxes and shipping, and the delivery estimate. You can go back and change any of it, or abandon the order entirely, at any point before you confirm payment on Stripe's checkout page. Confirming payment is what forms the agreement.

After payment we email you a copy of the order: what you bought, what it cost, and the links you need (the download, or the gift link and the code that manages it). Keep that email. Because the service has no accounts, that email is the only copy of those links and codes, and we cannot regenerate a management code that has been lost.

6. Delivery

A gift link and a digital plate are delivered immediately, or within a few minutes, by email and on screen. A printed plate is produced and shipped by our print partner Prodigi; the delivery estimate and the carrier are shown at checkout and depend on the destination and the size ordered. If a printed order has not shipped within 30 days of the date we gave you, you may cancel it for a full refund, and we will tell you before that point if we already know it will be late.

7. Your cancellation rights under Ontario law

Ontario's Consumer Protection Act, 2002 gives you specific rights on an internet agreement where your total payment obligation is more than $50. We would rather state them plainly than bury them:

• You may cancel within seven days of receiving your copy of the agreement if we failed to disclose the required information before you entered it, or failed to give you an express opportunity to accept or decline and to correct errors first. Section 5 above is how we meet that obligation.
• You may cancel within thirty days of the agreement if we never delivered your copy of it. The confirmation email described in section 5 is that copy.
• Separately, if we deliver a printed order late, the 30-day rule in section 6 applies.

To exercise any of these, email us and say so. You do not need a reason and you do not need to use any particular wording. We will refund within 15 days of a valid cancellation, as the Act requires.

8. Refunds and reprints

The same policy is set out on its own page, in plainer language: Returns and Refunds.

• Digital plates and gift links are delivered immediately. Once delivered they are not refundable, except where something on our side genuinely failed: a file that will not open, a link that will not load, a plate rendered wrong. Tell us and we will fix it or refund it.
• Printed plates: if yours arrives damaged, defective, or not what you ordered, tell us within 14 days of delivery and we will reprint and reship it at no cost to you. A photo of the problem helps us get the reprint right and to claim it with the print lab, but we will not refuse you for lack of one.
• Every plate is generated specifically from what you typed and uploaded, which makes it a custom, personalised good made to your own specification. We ship only within Canada and the United States, and neither imposes a general change-of-mind cooling-off period on goods like that. So outside the statutory rights in section 7 and the reprint guarantee above, a correctly produced printed plate is not returnable simply because you changed your mind. If we ever begin shipping elsewhere, this section has to be revisited before we do.

9. Your content, and what you allow us to do with it

You keep ownership of everything you supply: the name, the caption, the message, the date, the song choice and any photo. You are responsible for having the right to use it. By supplying it you confirm that you do, and specifically that any photo is yours to submit or that you have the consent of the person in it.

So that we can actually deliver what you bought, you grant us a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, process, reproduce and transmit that content purely for the purposes of producing and delivering your sky, link, file or print, including passing what is necessary to the print lab. That licence lasts only as long as we retain the content (see the Privacy Policy for exactly how long that is) and it covers nothing else. We do not use your content to advertise or promote the service, and we do not license it onward to anyone except as needed to fulfil your order.

10. What you may not use the service for

Do not use the service to impersonate someone, to harass, threaten or defame, to upload a photo of a person who has not agreed to it, to submit anything unlawful or hateful, or to attempt to break, overload or probe the service or get at other people's orders. We may remove a gift link, refuse or cancel an order, or decline further service if we reasonably conclude one of these has happened. If we cancel a paid order on this basis we will refund it, unless refunding it would itself facilitate the abuse.

11. Gift links

A paid gift link is stored for 12 months from the day it is created, after which it expires and its contents are deleted. You can delete it earlier at any time, yourself, using the management link and code in your confirmation email. That deletion is immediate and permanent: we cannot restore a deleted link, and we cannot recover a lost management code. A link whose payment never completes is never stored at all.

12. There are no accounts

The service deliberately has no user accounts and no passwords. A gift link's management code and your payment receipt are the only credentials involved, and the email we send you is the only copy of them. This is a privacy choice, and the trade-off is that a lost email cannot be recovered by us.

13. Other companies involved

Payment is processed by Stripe. Printing and shipping are done by Prodigi. Transactional email is sent through Resend. Song search uses Apple's public iTunes catalogue, and song playback, if you supply a Spotify link, is handled by Spotify's own embedded player. Using those features means their terms apply to that part of what happens, alongside these. We choose and remain accountable for these providers, but we do not control their services.

14. Availability and accuracy

The service is provided as it is and as it is available. We work to keep the star data and the computed positions correct, and the catalogue and method are stated openly so you can check them, but we do not promise the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or available at any particular moment. We may change, suspend or discontinue parts of it; if we discontinue something you have already paid for and not yet received, we will refund it.

15. Warranties we cannot and do not exclude

Ontario law implies certain conditions and warranties into a consumer sale, including that goods are of merchantable quality and match their description, and the Consumer Protection Act, 2002 makes void any attempt by a supplier to negate or vary them. We do not attempt to. Nothing anywhere in these terms removes, limits, or asks you to waive:

• the implied conditions and warranties that apply to this sale under the Sale of Goods Act and the Consumer Protection Act, 2002;
• your substantive rights under consumer protection legislation, or your right to bring or join a proceeding, including a class proceeding;
• liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

If any part of these terms conflicts with a right you have under that legislation, the legislation wins and that part does not apply to you.

16. Limitation of liability

Subject entirely to section 15, and to the extent the law allows it:

• our total liability to you for any claim connected to the service or an order is limited to the amount you actually paid us for the order the claim relates to;
• we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits or business, or for loss of data you did not obtain from us, arising from use of the service;
• we are not liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our control, including an outage at Stripe, Prodigi, Resend, Apple, Spotify or our host, or a carrier's failure to deliver, though we will still refund or reprint under sections 7 and 8 where those apply.

Because the free parts of the service are free, and because a keepsake is not a critical system, please do not rely on the service as the only record of anything that matters to you.

17. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top changes when we do, and the current version is always the one on this page. A change does not apply retroactively to an order you have already placed: the terms that govern your order are the ones in force when you placed it. Continuing to use the service after a change means you accept the changed terms for anything you do afterwards.

18. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the laws of Canada that apply there, and the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident somewhere else, this does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory consumer law of the place you actually live, and it does not stop you bringing a claim where the law of your own province or state says you may.

19. How to reach us

Written in Real Stars
Safowan Mostaque, sole proprietor
581 Meadowvale Road, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada
writteninrealstars@gmail.com
(647) 491-2051
Contact page

See also the Privacy Policy and the Accessibility Statement.